"Vortex Based Mathematics by Marko Rodin"

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Be sure to read the Carver Mead interview.

"Therefore, Bohr advocated the use of both pictures, which he called 'complementary' to each other. The two pictures are of course mutually exclusive, because a certain thing cannot at the same time be a particle(i.e., substance confined to a very small volume) and a wave (i.e. a field spread out over a large space), but the two complement each other. By playing with both pictures, by going from the one picture to the other and back again, we finally get the right impression of the strange kind of reality behind our atomic experiments." (Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 23)

How can two mutually exclusive realities be 'complementary' to each other? I'll tell you: In our imagination.

This is a codified 'gestalt switch' that allows a physicist to claim he doesn't understand, while simultaneously claiming that this non-understanding is the way things exist in nature.

This is a psychological symptom of a failed conceptual endeavor. I quoted Bohm earlier:

"That is to say, the primary 'mistake' that can be made in this field is not the positive one of wrongly assigning what originates in thought to a reality independent of thought. Rather, it is the negative one of overlooking or failing to be aware that a certain movement originates in thought, and thus implicitly treating that movement as originating in non-thought. In this way, what is actually the one single process of thought is tacitly treated as if it were split in two parts (but of course without one being aware that this is happening). Such unconscious fragmentation of the process of thought must lead to distortion in all of perception." (Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p. 78)

Curious at all about all the other stuff I wrote in my posts, or are you just tinkering around the edges of the argument?

Originally posted by beebs
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

Pour some sand on your table at home and wait.

I guarantee they will not start behaving uncertainly and statistically, interfering with one another to produce interference patterns etc. They will not form the cymatics patterns without the wave in the medium.

So you are agreeing that the video proves your statement false then? The video is not of sand sitting on my kitchen table, is it?

If you want to call the particles separate from the waves and REAL, but the waves are actually representing something REAL also - then you are taking the position that there is like a 'guiding wave' or 'pilot wave'. That would say that there could be the particles, but their actual wave behavior is due to some objectively real and deterministic 'hidden variable' (the 'pilot wave').

I haven't ruled out the pilot wave interpretation though apparently some people have. I don't think anybody has really proven which interpretation is correct so until it's proven, I'd say the jury is still out. My "position" as you put it, is to look at observations and experiments as a means of revealing how nature really is.

As for what's real, the probability density plots that were shown in the image in my post have been measured repeatedly. So at least in the sense a photograph of an object is a real representation of whatever was photographed, it's showing us something real, but in the sense that it's only a photograph, it's not the real object, as the probability density plots only give us a "picture" so to speak, using that analogy. A picture of my house is not my house, but it's a pretty good likeness of it. Likewise the probability density plots of electron orbitals are pretty good representations of where we expect to find the electron when we observe it. I don't really know exactly how electrons move inside atoms or what their structure is when we aren't looking at it, we can only say that when we look at it, here's where it is. That's what the probability density plots show for many observations.

Originally posted by beebs
This is a codified 'gestalt switch' that allows a physicist to claim he doesn't understand, while simultaneously claiming that this non-understanding is the way things exist in nature.

And then making cavalier statements like, "If you don't like it, get another universe!" when dissenting views are attempting to be heard, so to speak.

Originally posted by Mary Rose
And then making cavalier statements like, "If you don't like it, get another universe!" when dissenting views are attempting to be heard, so to speak.

Yes, when "dissenting views" divorce themselves from what we actually observe -- this was the gist of Feynman's message. And we can observe some really weird things, like neutrino oscillations. They are really ugly philosophically, but that's what we see. Some would say it's "cymatics", or "vibratory resonance" or "orgone flux" or other such nonsense. Well, they are free to move to the world where all of this is true. In ours, it's not.

Originally posted by beebs
Be sure to read the Carver Mead interview.

"Therefore, Bohr advocated the use of both pictures, which he called 'complementary' to each other. The two pictures are of course mutually exclusive, because a certain thing cannot at the same time be a particle(i.e., substance confined to a very small volume) and a wave (i.e. a field spread out over a large space), but the two complement each other. By playing with both pictures, by going from the one picture to the other and back again, we finally get the right impression of the strange kind of reality behind our atomic experiments." (Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 23)

How can two mutually exclusive realities be 'complementary' to each other? I'll tell you: In our imagination.

This is a codified 'gestalt switch' that allows a physicist to claim he doesn't understand, while simultaneously claiming that this non-understanding is the way things exist in nature.

Complementarity is a mainstream view. You may be surprised that I'm not going to try to defend it as the only possibility. There may be other possibilities.

However I also see it as a problem when people try to infer that because things behave a certain way in the macro world, that they should necessarily exhibit similar behaviors on an atomic scale. This to me seems to be the basis in that quote for claiming complementarity must be false. It is not a persuasive argument at all to me. So the best I can say is that there may be alternatives to complementarity. I can't say it's wrong, and indeed it may very well be right.

Personally I don't have a problem with electrons and baseballs exhibiting different behavior, but if you look at the math, you can apply the same math. You can calculate the DeBroglie wavelength of a baseball, but as you will see when you do that, it's kind of hard to perform the double slit experiment with a baseball. And then you may begin to understand why even if a baseball has a DeBroglie wavelength, you don't typically see it exhibiting wave-like behavior.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
And then you may begin to understand why even if a baseball has a DeBroglie wavelength, you don't typically see it exhibiting wave-like behavior.

Yes, that's not a bad analogy.

I read some of Carver Mead's materials, and one example of his argument stands out, which is a laser (another is a superconducting magnet). One can indeed argue that the wave in the laser cavity is one integral whole and can't be thought of as a particle. In my opinion, however, there is an important omission going on here, which is when you observe interaction of the field created by the laser with any object at all, you will observe quantization i.e. particle-like properties. Same applies to superconducting states.

So we can be looking at systems that are quite uncomfortable philosophically for many people to look at in the first place. To take an absolute and extreme position in these circumstances is fraught with inaccuracies just like in many other approaches.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

So you are agreeing that the video proves your statement false then? The video is not of sand sitting on my kitchen table, is it?

No... but is the sand also the wave? Those grains of sand are being pushed into order by the standing wave patterns of the table-medium. They are not producing the cymatics by themselves. Likewise, fragmented grains of particulate atoms cannot produce wave behavior and cymatic orbitals. If we try to think of the situation as 'particles behaving like waves' then we are stuck in the psychological quagmire of a gestalt switch that produces ad hoc mathematical nonsense and extra epicycles to the theory. What we have, instead, is waves behaving like waves. Makes perfect sense. Read Mead's interview.

I haven't ruled out the pilot wave interpretation though apparently some people have. I don't think anybody has really proven which interpretation is correct so until it's proven, I'd say the jury is still out. My "position" as you put it, is to look at observations and experiments as a means of revealing how nature really is.

As for what's real, the probability density plots that were shown in the image in my post have been measured repeatedly. So at least in the sense a photograph of an object is a real representation of whatever was photographed, it's showing us something real, but in the sense that it's only a photograph, it's not the real object, as the probability density plots only give us a "picture" so to speak, using that analogy. A picture of my house is not my house, but it's a pretty good likeness of it. Likewise the probability density plots of electron orbitals are pretty good representations of where we expect to find the electron when we observe it. I don't really know exactly how electrons move inside atoms or what their structure is when we aren't looking at it, we can only say that when we look at it, here's where it is. That's what the probability density plots show for many observations.

If your technique is to look at the observations and experiments, then you must understand how critical your interpretation a posteriori is to the answers you perceive and the follow up questions you ask.

The probability density plots are showing you what you want to see: the statistics of where we are likely to observe a quanta. You acknowledge that 'its not the real object', yet fail to see how it is being paraded as the real object. You are not 'finding' the electron when you make an observation, you are supposedly 'collapsing all possibility into actuality' (because remember, according to the prevailing interpretation, nature is existing in a super-duper statistical way that is intrinsically uncertain).

What if I told you those weren't probability density plots, but mean representations of an actual quantum wave field.

The 'electron' is NOT a 'particle' flitting in and out of existence in all possible situations that interferes with itself and exists in potentiality until we observe it and collapse it into reality as a 'particle' we want it to be.

It is a 3D quantum wave field.

Here is another spoonful, if you still haven't taken the time to read Mead's interview:

But they’re also waves, right? Then what are they waving in?

It’s interesting, isn’t it? That has hung people up ever since the time of Clerk Maxwell, and it’s the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people. The electron isn’t the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that’s wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium. You don’t need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn’t something that has a fixed physical shape. Waves propagate outwards, and they can be large or small. That’s what waves do.

So how big is an electron?

It expands to fit the container it’s in. That may be a positive charge that’ s attracting it—a hydrogen atom—or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That’s what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That’s what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But there’s nothing uncertain about it. It’s just a property of waves. Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that’s ten feet across, there’s no problem with that. It’s its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across.

A ten-foot electron! Amazing!

It could be a mile. The electrons in my superconducting magnet are that long.

A mile-long electron! That alters our picture of the world—most people’s minds think about atoms as tiny solar systems.

Right, that’s what I was brought up on—this little grain of something. Now it’s true that if you take a proton and you put it together with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom. But what that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting with each other. They want to be close together because one’s positive and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy lower. But if they get too close they wiggle too much and that makes the energy higher. So there’s a place where they are just right, and that’s what determines the size of the hydrogen atom. And that optimum is a self-consistent solution of the Schrodinger equation.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

Complementarity is a mainstream view. You may be surprised that I'm not going to try to defend it as the only possibility. There may be other possibilities.

Yeah, I know. I am arguing against it. Please refresh your knowledge of the historical issues surrounding the development of quantum mechanics. I am arguing on the side of: Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohm, Mead, etc. This is not a case of 'mainstream truth' vs. 'internet crap'. This is a discussion of what arguments have the most reasonable premises, and which approach towards reality is better. I do not believe nature is fundamentally and intrinsically uncertain. I believe there is actually a deterministic reality that exists in-between observations.

Please read what Heisenberg's positions were regarding people who proposed 'material ontologies' (aka 'realists') and why he thought we should change the whole logical and conceptual structure of human thought based on his and Bohr's philosophical conclusions from THEIR interpretation and theoretical models.

I don't think you realize quite what the 'mainstream' view actually is. You seem pretty reasonable, and I would think you would agree with someone like Mead over someone like Bohr and Heisenberg. Please read the Mead interview.

However I also see it as a problem when people try to infer that because things behave a certain way in the macro world, that they should necessarily exhibit similar behaviors on an atomic scale. This to me seems to be the basis in that quote for claiming complementarity must be false. It is not a persuasive argument at all to me. So the best I can say is that there may be alternatives to complementarity. I can't say it's wrong, and indeed it may very well be right.

Where does this divide between 'micro' and 'macro' come from? Is that distinction 'real'? Is it meaningful?

How can we have deterministic things coming from indeterminate and fundamentally uncertain processes?

'Complementary' is not something in nature. It is a philosophical idea proposed in a theory in order to make more sense of what appeared to be non-classical data in the early years of quantum theory. It was a fudge factor introduced by Bohr because everyone at the time didn't understand what the hell was going on. Heisenberg and Bohr made their careers by proposing that quantum mechanics is the answer, however unintelligible. Einstein and others remained skeptical because he thought there had to be an actual reality between the observations that could be understood with the right concepts and tools. He thought thats what the whole point of being a scientist was. H & B argued with him over philosophical principles and won because Einstein's counterexamples and other thought experiments could not be verified. Read the Mead interview etc.

Originally posted by beebs
No... but is the sand also the wave? Those grains of sand are being pushed into order by the standing wave patterns of the table-medium. They are not producing the cymatics by themselves. Likewise, fragmented grains of particulate atoms cannot produce wave behavior and cymatic orbitals.

I'm not sure which side you're arguing on here. The electrons don't make those shapes in the probability density plot all by themselves. They only do it when they are part of an atom.

What if I told you those weren't probability density plots, but mean representations of an actual quantum wave field.

I'd say they are still probability density plots. I never said they couldn't represent more than that, but I don't know what you mean by "actual quantum wave field". What are the measurables and the properties of this such that I can confirm this claim in the lab?

Originally posted by beebs
I don't think you realize quite what the 'mainstream' view actually is. You seem pretty reasonable, and I would think you would agree with someone like Mead over someone like Bohr and Heisenberg. Please read the Mead interview.

I'm somewhat "agnostic" in this regard, though I have what I suppose are philosophical problems with the "many worlds" interpretation, but if enough evidence was presented to support that's really the way it is, I could accept it. I just doubt the likelihood of that being the case.

Where does this divide between 'micro' and 'macro' come from? Is that distinction 'real'? Is it meaningful?

In a way I gave you the answer to that. Calculate the DeBroglie wavelength of an electron in a double-slit experiment. Then calculate the DeBroglie wavelength of a baseball. Then try to find the "cutoff point". Mathematically, there is no exact "cutoff point. But you can see that what happens to the wavelength calculations as the particles get larger and larger. Have you tried this? I have. It's an exercise worth doing if you want to know the "cutoff point" between quantum and macro. You run the numbers and you tell me where the numbers say the cutoff point is. You agree that the electron exhibits wavelike interference in the double slit experiment, and that this has never been demonstrated with baseballs, correct? I think the double slit experiment has been performed with buckyballs, and if so then the cutoff point is somewhere between the size of a buckyball and a baseball. I don't know how much larger than a buckyball we can go, and still do the double slit experiment successfully, but I doubt that's the absolute maximum upper limit; it's just the largest so far.

'Complementary' is not something in nature. It is a philosophical idea proposed in a theory in order to make more sense of what appeared to be non-classical data in the early years of quantum theory. It was a fudge factor introduced by Bohr because everyone at the time didn't understand what the hell was going on.

So are you saying that now we do understand what the hell is going on? While the Copenhagen interpretation seems to be somewhat preferred, I really don't see people claiming it's proven. I still see more experiments taking place, with explanations that the new experiments still don't prove which interpretation is correct but they may be making some progress.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by beebs
No... but is the sand also the wave? Those grains of sand are being pushed into order by the standing wave patterns of the table-medium. They are not producing the cymatics by themselves. Likewise, fragmented grains of particulate atoms cannot produce wave behavior and cymatic orbitals.

I'm not sure which side you're arguing on here. The electrons don't make those shapes in the probability density plot all by themselves. They only do it when they are part of an atom.

The vibrating table covered in sand is a completely wrong analogy to compare with an atom.

The pattern of displacement of the vibrating surface can be looked at as field of a very specific shape, with crests and nodes. The particles are physically moved by this field, that is quite complex, geometrically. It's not too difficult to see that we can create an electrostatic pattern that's complex, and tiny particles would reflect configuration of this field in some way.

If you look at an atom, you'll something quite different. The field (in a good approximation for this discussion) is a spherically symmetric Coulomb field. It does not possess "nooks and crannies" to be occupied by unsuspecting electrons.

reply to post by buddhasystem

That's why I made this disclaimer when I posted the video:

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
I'm not trying to say this video either is or is not a model of what happens on the atomic scale, I'm only showing it as an example that your generalizations are wrong. Particles can indeed appear in densities shaped like waves, even if the particles themselves aren't waves. This video proves that doesn't it?

It wasn't posted as an example of what happens inside the atom. It was posted to illustrate that Beebs' claim was false.

But if you have a better video that I could have posted instead to do that, by all means post it.

Emerging from the vortex

Whether a car or a ball, the forces acting on a body moving in a straight line are very different to those acting on one moving in tight curves. This maxim also holds true at microscopic scales. As such, a beam of electrons that moves forward linearly has different properties to one with vortex-like properties. Since vortex beams show properties in magnetic fields that could lead to novel applications, a RIKEN-led research team has developed a theory that provides an understanding of these properties.

www.physorg.com...

reply to post by Americanist


In the link and text you quote, nothing is emerging from a vortex. There is just a light beam with corkscrew characteristics.

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by beebs
No... but is the sand also the wave? Those grains of sand are being pushed into order by the standing wave patterns of the table-medium. They are not producing the cymatics by themselves. Likewise, fragmented grains of particulate atoms cannot produce wave behavior and cymatic orbitals.

I'm not sure which side you're arguing on here. The electrons don't make those shapes in the probability density plot all by themselves. They only do it when they are part of an atom.

The vibrating table covered in sand is a completely wrong analogy to compare with an atom.

If you look at an atom, you'll something quite different. The field (in a good approximation for this discussion) is a spherically symmetric Coulomb field. It does not possess "nooks and crannies" to be occupied by unsuspecting electrons.

they are very much similar. do you understand that electrons and particles are not solid discrete precisely measurable things? electrons are NOT spherical balls that elementary school teaches.....they are most accurately "clouds" of energy.

electrons are clouds. thus the term "electron cloud", & "probability cloud". the electrons are a probability of dense energy. the energy is coalesced into "clouds" VERY MUCH LIKE the "nooks and crannies" illustrated in the video. ... which is awesome.

Originally posted by metalshredmetal
they are very much similar.

Please do make an effort to read my post. Sand is subjected to a field with a complex geometrical structure, whereas the electron in the H atom is not. Meditate on this, if you will. That should be a very simple thing to understand for an average person, your mileage will vary.

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by metalshredmetal
they are very much similar.

Sand is subjected to a field with a complex geometrical structure, whereas the electron in the H atom is not.

Prove it?

You are saying that elections and atoms are not within a field..most specifically a field that demonstrates geometry.

Can you prove that there is no geometry involved in fields? Keep in mind as you meditate this that ANY amount of symmetry is an example of geometry.

Can you prove that EM fields that are generated around atoms have NO symmetry?

Originally posted by metalshredmetal

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by metalshredmetal
they are very much similar.

Sand is subjected to a field with a complex geometrical structure, whereas the electron in the H atom is not.

Prove it?

You are saying that elections and atoms are not within a field..most specifically a field that demonstrates geometry.

Can't you tell a difference between a spherically symmetric field and the one that looks like a washboard? What, you really can't? Sorry, I can't help then.

reply to post by buddhasystem


Yes, avoiding the question, avoiding an answer, avoiding backing up your statements with real proof.

not surprised.

Originally posted by metalshredmetal
reply to post by buddhasystem

 

Yes, avoiding the question, avoiding an answer, avoiding backing up your statements with real proof.

not surprised.

This is a line from your post:

Can you prove that there is no geometry involved in fields?

This has to be one of the dimmest lines I've seen in this thread. Did I ever said there was not geometry involved? Why do I need to prove something I didn't say in the first place? Does "spherical" sound like a geometry to you or does it not?

Useless.

Apologies for the interruption here, I just wanted to throw in there that not all atoms are spherical. Some external environments do not have spherical symmetry either. That's all uncertainty principle issues though...